1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a method, system, and computer program product for modeling business processes. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method, system, and computer program product for business process modeling using a question and answer system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Business Process Modeling (BPM) defines a business process (BP), where the process flow contains multiple activities and sub-processes. An example of a business process is a process for making loans. A task or a sub-process within the loan-making business process is the process of performing credit verification of the loan Applicant.
Most organizations have specialized domain experts or business analysts who are well-versed and responsible for modeling the business processes in the operating environment, or domain, of the organization. Because of their domain expertise, such individuals are able to model standard tasks, such as how to perform credit verification in the organization's loan approval process.
Modeling business processes is often a manual task of creating a business process flow by defining the tasks that participate in the business process, labeling the tasks, and ordering the labeled tasks in some desired order to accomplish the business process according to the organization's needs.
A BPM tool is a software application, which accepts the business process flow as defined, labeled and ordered by the analyst and outputs a model of the business process in a business process modeling language. The model in the modeling language is then usable for implementing the business process in a workflow using one or more data processing systems and applications.
Natural language processing (NLP) is a technique that facilitates exchange of information between humans and data processing systems. For example, one branch of NLP pertains to transforming a given content into a human-usable language or form. For example, NLP can accept a document whose content is in a computer-specific language or form, and produce a document whose corresponding content is in a human-readable form.
A question and answer system (Q and A system) is an artificial intelligence application executing on data processing hardware. A Q and A system answers questions pertaining to a given subject-matter domain presented in natural language.
Typically, a Q and A system is provided access to a collection of information, forming a knowledgebase, based on which the Q and A system answers questions pertaining to that domain. For example, a Q and A system accesses a body of knowledge about the domain, where the body of knowledge (knowledgebase) can be organized in a variety of configurations. For example, a knowledgebase of a domain can include structured repository of domain-specific information, such as ontologies, or unstructured data related to the domain, or a collection of natural language documents about the domain.